Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

One must either take an interest in the human situation or else parade before the void.

What's the point of our life? Everything seems absurd until we die, and then it makes sense.

It is worth while dying, to find out what life is.

Let's say that life is this square of the sidewalk. We are born at this crack and we die at that crack. Now we find ourselves somewhere inside the square and in the process of walking outside of it. Suddenly, we realize our time in here is fleeting. Is our quick experience here pointless? Does anything we say or do in here really matter? Have we done anything important? Have we been happy? Have we made the most of these precious few footsteps?

I think life's an irrational obsession.

Living is abnormal.

Unbeing dead isn't being alive.

I believe life is a parenthesis between two nothings. I'm an atheist. I believe in a personal God, which is conscience, and that's what we must be accountable to every day.

Drink! for you know not whence you came nor why: drink! for you know not why you go, nor where.

Well, I think the main message is there is more to your story. There is more than what happens between the crib and the grave, and that is what I am really trying to speak to, this idea that all of life is this life and that there is nothing more than what we see and experience right here on this earth.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.

To be, or not to be, that is the question.

Often and often must he have thought, that, to be or not to be forever, was a question, which must be settled; as it is the foundation, and the only foundation upon which we feel that there can rest one thought, one feeling, or one purpose worthy of a human soul.

I've jokingly said that everything I'm doing now is filling up the hours before I die, but I do feel that slightly. I have no religious beliefs so this is the ride. This is it. So I'm just like anyone, I suppose, trying to fill out the days in the most interesting way possible.

The fact we exist merely means we exist. That's all it means.

Horror, almost better than any of the other genres, pits the will to live against the will toward nihilism. I just think that's worth exploring. I don't know what is more important, actually, to explore than that very dynamic.

Is death that which gives meaning to life?

it seems a silly kind o' business to bring us into the world at all for no special reason 'cept to take us out of it again just as folks 'ave learned to know us a bit and find us useful.

But what is life if you don't live it?

life's not a paragraph And death i think is no parenthesis

Does anything really matter? We all end up in the same place. All that's left is our Wikipedia entry.

O your life, your lonely lifeWhat have you ever done with it,And done with the great gift of consciousness?What will you ever do before Death's knifeProvides the answer ultimate and appropriate?As I for my part felt in my heart as one who falls,Falls in a parachute, falls endlessly, and feels the vastDraft of the abyss sucking him down and down,An endlessly helplessly falling and appalled clown:This is the way the night passes by, thisIs the overnight endless trip to the famous unfathomable abyss.

Everybody dies. What matters is what you do between now and when it happens to you.

Man," he said, "I'm not afraid of graveyards. The dead are just, you know, people who wanted the same things you and I want." "What do we want?" I asked blurrily. "Aw, man, you know," he said. "We just want, well, the same things these people wanted." "What was that?" He shrugged. "To live, I guess," he said.